Drug Discovery and the future of pharmaceuticals

Hi Everybody in MC617!

Just to share a couple of my thoughts on the history of drug discovery, it seems that humanity has always had a desire to seek out medicinal plants and plant extracts to cure physical and psychological ailments that have afflicted those individuals and their community members. Most likely, this type of behavior has been ongoing long before the earliest records of the first human civilizations. Beginning with plant-based medicines, and stretching through the serendipitous discovery and identification of major breakthrough drugs such as penicillin, and finally arriving where we are today with sophisticated high-throughput screening, semi-synthetic, and full synthetic methods to create and identify the most effective molecules, I find that the history of drug discovery is quite fascinating and has adapted to many challenges the health care system has faced as it has grown and transformed along with the world-wide, highly integrated society that we all live in today.

Building on this idea, I think that the pharmaceutical industry, medicinal chemists, and overall the field of drug discovery will have to capitalize on new bio-medical research and technology that is arriving at rapid pace. One idea that is already being seriously developed and utilized to improve patient outcomes is the personalization of drug therapy with pharmacogenomics. Being able to determine what drugs will work best for a particular medical problem, based on the genetics of the patient or the infectious organism, is a logical next step for the health care system to not only have more effective treatments for disease, but also the potential for reduced costs, and decreasing the chances of microorganism resistance to antimicrobial drugs.

The other area of drug discovery and formulation that I find incredibly fascinating is the area of gene therapy, with the potential to be approached from many different angles. First, the idea of virotherapy and virosomes which have, to me, a seemingly infinite potential for targeting specific cell types, such as oncolytic viruses, and viral vectors for gene therapy to introduce copies of genes that are mutated or missing in individuals with genetic disease. Another potentially incredible method of gene therapy is the utilization of siRNA or short-interfering RNA and the RNA interference pathway to modify DNA expression. Obviously these sorts of bio-regulatory pathways are poorly understood, so there needs to be an outpouring of breakthrough research before these can be developed into widely-available treatments that can have a real impact on individual healthcare; however with the exponential growth of biomedical technology I don't think the idea is so far-fetched that we will see this technology being utilized within our lifetimes.